sketched game: Boys and Pirates

[anonymouse]

I'm actually thinking Universalis would do pretty great, but it's never been game-y enough for me. My first title was "Boys & Fairies" but I think anyone into high school would start coming up with alternate meanings for that. Another - and even more obvious - title would be "Pirates & Pans" (to go with the n&n format so popular). But then fairies fell to the wayside a little in importance, and this should work just as well.

Sooo..

--
Once upon a time, there was a boy who never grew old; who loved stories; who fought the pirates that plagued him and his Land.

And while the story should have ended with the boy defeating the pirates, it did not. The pirates killed the boy; the pirates won. And seasons - Winter, Spring, Autumn - came to the land and Summer fled, and more pirates came, and their ships took to the skies to raid and pillage and ruin.


YOU are a boy, and with you is a fairy. You can fly, you can fight, and you never grow old. You battle the pirates across the Land, trying to bring Summer back.

the IMPORTANT things:

* what is your Happy Thought?
* what does your Blade look like?
* what Clothes are you wearing?
* what is your most Valuable Treasure?
* what is your Name?
* what is your Fairy's Name?

You should feel free to draw or paint your Blade, Clothes, and Valuable Treasure.

GOALS of Play:

* Found a SECRET BASE (need 10 Stories)
* Capture a PIRATE SHIP (need 50 Stories)
* Convince others in the Land to FIGHT THE PIRATES (need 100 Stories)
* DEFEAT THE PIRATES and bring Summer back to the Land (need 200 Stories)

HOW to Play:
--

Okay, so here I'm hitting a bit of a block so far. Here's what I'd like to see in play:

1: Players are describing their actions. They continually get Adventure Points for doing things; Clever Things, Brave Things, Funny Things, maybe some others.

2: I'm not sure I actually want points to be "spent". Maybe you simply unlock new stuff as you go along. Like once you hit 5 AP you can encounter an Indian or a Tiger, and at 10 AP maybe a Mermaid. Pirates of No Importance would be very low AP, while Pirates of Great Importance (Hook and his ilk) are pretty high.

3: a Story needs at least 20 AP to be considered complete. Otherwise, it's a boring story and doesn't count for much of anything. I mean, you might as well have been sleeping! Geeze.

4: You can carry AP over from one Story to another. This way, you can start a Story off with, say, Mermaids and Alligators rather than having to work your way up. But you have to tie the points together. Like say you have 13 AP, and you want to introduce a Mermaid. You should say how those AP, from a past Story, influence this new one. Maybe a "Prologue" phase for Stories, to pre-allocate AP?

5: You need to tell Stories! Stories are how you accomlish the Goals. Tell stories, and then you can get Stuff! Maybe a better Blade, or, as above, Story Goals: a Secret Base, your own Pirate Ship, and so on.

6: Fairies can do stuff for you! But they can only have one Feeling in them at a time, and this Feeling colors what they do. Fairies can also be pretty capricious, so I think this would be a good place for a die-roll. I'm thinking a D8 or D12, with Feelings assigned as per the Reverse RPG rules.

7: An idea I had was that there'd be another game after this. Boys who found a Girl to love would move on to this other game, sort of like moving between the early editions of D&D as you went up in level.

--

So that's what I've got so far. This is a collection-post before I forget things, and if I dink around in Notepad before posting I might lose a bit of steam. So, thoughts? I was originally going to put this in RPG Theory because it wasn't coherant enough yet, but as I got going I was more and more excited at the idea, so here it is.

[C. Edwards]

Lots of lawsuit possibilities here. ;)

I do have some questions.

1) Why is there still Spring? I mean, I know it was an eternal Summer or what not in the source material, but Spring is a pretty sweet season too if you're a boy.

2)What do you mean by "You have to tell Stories"? Do you mean that "in character" you have to tell stories to the other players?

3)What do you see being a 0AP encounter? You have to have some initial encounter in order to gain your first AP, right?

Those are the first things that hit me. I may have more once the idea settles in.

-Chris

[anonymouse]

Well, I went to effort to just calling it the Land and such, re: trademarks. It seems so weird to think of the story as something that would have lawyers defending it.. not only in spirit but, you know, it just seems like it's old enough to be classic-y. Hum. Anyway.

1) The impact of the Boys gives the Land a little bit of Spring. Not a lot, not often, but some. Plus, this allows for some green things, and makes Autumn all the worse (since there's more stuff to die going into Winter).

Plus, I think a "year" would go by relatively quickly; it wouldn't necessarily take 90 days to get to the next definite change of season. This is all spawned from the just-released new movie; it's Winter when Pan isn't in Neverland, and season changes back to Winter during some emotional turmoil.

2) No, not in character. To borrow Daniel's phrase for WTF? I see play as a form of "competitive storytelling". Competing against the system, I think: it sets the limits of what you can do, and when you can surpass those limits. This is why I mentioned Universalis; the same kind of play, as I understand it.

Also, trying to be the most Clever, Brave, or Funny Boy, perhaps, amongst the players.

3) I'm not sure what a 0AP encounter would be. I'm not sure what the AP chart would like at all, yet, except what I've outlined. Baseline stuff would have to be pretty generic; "a pretend fight with another Boy" or "a piece of treasure washing up on the shore".

Good questions! =)

[C. Edwards]

I'm still mulling things over but I do have one piece of solid input right now.

All 0AP encounters should involve monkeys. Wicked monkeys, Wise monkeys, Silly little monkeys.

-Chris

[anonymouse]

Actually, I think that could be a good category for 0AP: normal animals. Monkii, parrots, dolphins and so on. Alligators are kind of like dragons, though, so I think they have to remain an AP cost.

The basic idea was of a system that supported slowly building up a grand Adventure Story. You tried to put in lots of adventuresome things (wicked thieving monkeys! a crafty Indian! a fearsome blow in a great battle!) and then be able to tell more, better stories.

It's a self-imposed limit, but I think it's cool.

[Jeph]

This strikes me as, from the start, a game that will need a LOT of playtesting, for one simple reason: you can never guess how many Clever, Daring, and Silly things the players will come up with.

Actually, it might be a good idea to involve a sort of personalized "playtesting" in the rules themselves--maybe a sounding out session in which the GM or whatever (or the group as a whole, if it's GMless) determines how many AP they get in an hour or so. From this, they could then create their own, personalized brackets--for Johny Go Quickly and his gang, you may need 300 AP to defeat the pirates, or else the game would be over in three sessions. For Sammy Come Slowly, you might only need 50, or they'd never so much as see a pirate.

Just a random thought,
--Jeff

[C. Edwards]

I dunno Jeph. I think that just setting 3 levels of AP requirement based on the playtest average would be sufficient. Something like "Momma's Boy" (beginner/easiest level), Good Ol' Boy (veteran/medium difficulty), and "Boy Wonder" (advanced/hardest level).

-Chris

[JimmyB]

Just as a quick legal side-note, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie is available as a Penguin Classic edition. In general this means that it entered the public domain, since Penguin Classics reprint books where the copyright has expired in order to save money.

This would make a lawsuit something of a challenge, particularly as your idea seems an original adaptation of the story.

I knew working in a bookshop would be good for something.

[C. Edwards]

Just as a quick legal side-note, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie is available as a Penguin Classic edition. In general this means that it entered the public domain, since Penguin Classics reprint books where the copyright has expired in order to save money.

Sweet! That gives me the urge to go down to the bookstore and mine all the Penguin Classics for material.

Looks like you're in the clear, mouse. :)

-Chris

[Doctor Xero]

Have you had much more look disabling your writer's block?

A few thoughts:

1) The way you describe AP is fairly similar to the old idea of Levels:
such and such an actions (earning xp) get me to a higher Level at which
point I encounter high Level obstacles and earn higher Level kewl toyz
and higher Level kewl powerz

2) How do Happy Thoughts, Blades, etc. influence the storytelling?  With
the sort of stories in your source materials, I would imagine that even
choice of name should influence the storytelling and action.  For example,
I can see how a sharp sword makes it easier to do Funny Things such as
slashing someone's belt so that his pants fall down while a thing sword
might work towards Clever Things such as using it to pick a lock.

3) How would you handle PC - PC conflict?  Remember, in the source
materials, being the best storyteller didn't always ensure you won --
Peter often won simply because he believed so strongly, such as when
he would gain weight on imaginary food while the others starved.

4) I think an important attribute of any game based on Barrie's work is
Barrie's sweet cynicism about children: "So long as children are young
and innocent -- and heartless."  How might you incorporate that into
the system?

5) Disney owns the rights only to their specific interpretations of Peter Pan
and company.  The Barrie play *Peter Pan* and his two books *Peter and
Wendy* and *Peter in Kensington Gardens* are public domain.  That's
why the cartoon *Peter and the Pirates* worked fine so long as the
characters looked different from the Disney version and the title was
different so that Disney could not allege an effort to fool people into
thinking the cartoon was a Disney television product.

Doctor Xero